U.S. to make deportation of illegal immigrants faster / New policy is designed to improve security at borders, cut costs

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, August 11, 2004

In a policy shift designed to improve national security and reduce costs, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced plans Tuesday to more swiftly deport illegal immigrants who are caught along the country's borders. At the same time, officials said they would allow Mexicans making legal short-term visits to the border region to stay up to a month, rather than the current three days.

The new deportation policy will subject more non-Mexican migrants to "expedited removal" -- a formal procedure that carries a five-year bar to re- entry and usually does not allow for a hearing before an immigration judge -- according to Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson.

"We want to send a clear message that those individuals who follow legal immigration procedures will benefit, while those who choose to break our nation's immigration laws will be promptly removed from the U.S.," he said.

Expedited removal is currently used for people trying to enter the country illegally at airports and border checkpoints. It will now apply to those caught anywhere within 100 miles of the border who have been in the United States for 14 days or less.

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The policy take effect today but will not be implemented until Border Patrol agents are trained in the new procedures, probably by month's end, Hutchinson said.

Mexicans and Canadians who enter illegally would continue to be eligible for "voluntary return," another rapid means of removal that does not carry a bar to legal re-entry, unless they are implicated in smuggling or other criminal activity, homeland security officials said.

The new policy was swiftly criticized by immigrant advocates who called it a punitive, Band-Aid approach.

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"The federal government is adding another piecemeal, patchwork layer of immigration enforcement over a fundamentally failed and dysfunctional system," said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum in Washington. "The Bush administration knows that real border security will only come with comprehensive immigration reform. ... But fearful of the rabid ant- immigration wing of the (Republican) party, the Bush administration seems to feel it can only tread water on this critical issue until after the election."

Groups favoring more stringent immigration controls also called the plan inadequate and said the government needed to more forcefully track down illegal immigrants.

"I'm underwhelmed," said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, in Washington. "They're saying they'll try to accelerate deportation, but that's not a long-term solution. Without interior enforcement, these border strategies are just short-term gimmicks."

Hutchinson said the new approach was needed because over the past 16 months, 42,000 people from countries other than Mexico had been caught along the southern border of the United States. Of those, 28,000 were released pending immigration hearings, but 90 percent of them did not appear for their hearings, he said. Officials suggested that the no-shows could potentially pose a risk to national security.

The agency also hopes to reduce the expense of detaining migrants, which averages $70 per day per person, added Homeland Security spokesman Bill Strassberger. People awaiting immigration hearings can be locked up for as long as a year, he said, while those facing "expedited removal" rarely stay in custody more than eight days.

Officials emphasized that those they apprehend would be screened to see whether they might qualify for asylum.

"Individuals who express a fear of being returned will be referred to a 'credible fear' interview with an asylum officer, and if they're deemed to have a credible fear of persecution, they will go to an immigration judge for an asylum hearing," said Strassberger. "But the majority of cases don't need that day in court, so let's get them out of the system; let's remove those people who are just trying to evade our Border Patrol."

Immigrant advocates expressed concern that people with legitimate fears of persecution might be sent home by border officials.

"Those of us who have worked with refugees know that it takes an awful lot of confidence-building to get people to reveal the dangers back home and the atrocities," said Isabel Garcia of the Tucson immigrant rights group, Derechos Humanos. "We're concerned people will be sent back to face possible death or incarceration."

In a bow to pressure from Mexico, as well as border-region businesses, Homeland Security's Hutchinson also announced Tuesday that Mexicans who hold temporary "border crossing cards" would be allowed to visit the U.S. border region for a month at a time, rather than the current 72 hours.

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